Let’s Keep The Keys to Our Inner Life

Paul Krugman today writes about wealth. It’s not just the wealth; it’s the fact the wealthy want the keys to our inner life. They want us to hand over the formula to our destiny. They want us to believe that their desire for unrestrained power and wealth represent, for the rest of us, the virtues of freedom. It’s the part of economics outside the numbers.

It’s a demand to surrender and submit. It merges Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, turns back on Eisenhower; replaces Milton Friedman with an Austrian, and follows the plan of Lewis F. Powell’s 1971 Chamber memo, to shift traditional party functions and fundraising to non-party units (AFP, Heritage) permanently organized around ideology, lobbying, and oversight. It uses the old language of communist and socialist threats with Reagan’s new anti-government yap; it’s energized and renewed by fear applauded as courage.

One key is race. Black advances are the national measure of progress, even as white standards affirm the status quo. Black advances (and those of women) show we are meeting the American Promise. The wealthy (of whom Obama noted “those with the most complain the loudest”) need black advances to become problems, advances of the wrong values, people, goals, removing any positive sentiment. In the links between wealth and race and politics, as income widens the margin of civil guarantees for blacks, women, and the poor narrows.

The proxy politicians of the wealthy are attempting to legitimize intolerance. The disinherited are being taken off the balance sheet.

Gale Stockwell: Parkville, Main Street, 1934. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Triggers and Blame

(Theme and variation is a structure I often use in my writing; it’s a way of looking at a topic or idea from differing points of view. Here I continue to explore the idea of either/or, how this simple formula can be skillfully manipulated  through context and unspoken clues. /wr.)

A big part of the American legacy is to reduce things to a simple either/or. It creates the illusion of being willing to make tough choices, of moving forward with decisive shows of strength while leaving piddling details unexamined.

Often this way turns out be a stumbling block; America trips over details and consequences patience would have allowed the nation to foresee. Obama’s mighty effort to restore the nation to the security and values of patience has been met at every turn with resistance.

But the Republican either/or has combined blame and virtue, a powerful two-thronged attack against the largely silent, milquetoast good news of the Democrats or. At the visceral level, blame is an adrenalin rush, it releases every bio element of fear and danger and fires aggression.

Peace, policy success, lower def con levels and unemployment is “lazy”–not in the Boehner sense but in the world of body chemistry–and the world before meth addicts, knife waving terrorists, domestic abusers, frackers killing 70,000 fish in Ohio, ISIL killing 1700 kneeling in a ditch, NSA taping private calls, kids shooting automatics, parents killing children, 300 girls lost because the world doesn’t seem to be looking–we are running psychological marathons against our fears.

“Lazy” now means those who won’t fight the good fight; it’s meaning has widened.

It’s hard to match blame and hate as natural triggers, especially when so many no longer value peace but are spoiling for fights.

From the Bassano Studio, London fashion. Early 20th century. London Museum.

Staggered Hurdles for US Middle East Diplomacy

Because of religion and ambition, everything in the Middle East has a double meaning. Suspicion runs high and no one knows who and when leaders can be trusted. Add to this the fact that many strategies have a short half-life and are quickly abandoned as ineffective or unworkable. (Count Bush’s previous reinventions.)

The main problem rests outside terrorism, in the tacit struggle for regional hegemony. States with competing views of Islamic polity (mainly Sunni and Shia, but other groups as well) struggle for dominance, each side wanting patronage, spoils and bragging rights. So helping a country is seen as advancing a sectarian group. And fighting terrorist threats within a country are often seen as attacks on the country.

Then the matrix multiplies! Attack ISIL in Iran: many see it as pretext and subterfuge for an attack against Sunnis; fewer see it as an attack against Iran and Shias; only a small minority see it as an attack against ISIL. Yet all sides will see it as an attempt to close a loop that the US opened when it brought war to the region. Implicitly then, US motives cannot be trusted. The mega-unifier is the US wants to crush the Middle East.

Do I agree? No. But the point is this thicket of entangled ideas, history, and relations remains inert, at the center of Middle East ideas and decisions. It crosses borders and undermines diplomacy.

It is showing up as outlined in how to fund Syrian rebels. Not the war, but its narrative, lacks a plan.

Who’s Who

Violence Is Nothing Without Money

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who likes to take a large, global view of issues and their social win individual actions, writes about money–while accepting the underlying view of its benefit. A better way would be to to turn the money off. Imaginary fantasies have real consequences when cash is put behind him. Dreams are no longer rooted in service but in greed. Money in our times is about power: its worst and best cases, its hidden relationships; the strategies, paradoxes, and personal and social scorecard of its pursuit as the prize.

Reset!

ISIL provides the perfect opportunity to stop wealth from enabling conflict at even greater expense.

How did ISIL go from the bottom heap of terrorists trying to catch on to a rocket ride to the top of the pack, in a little more than a year? Money. Not their fervor or charisma, not their skills at arms or their ruthlessness; what has made ISIL the first destination of the globe’s dispossessed children is money; it draws the crowd. Other groups force youth to join by threat; what sets ISIL apart is a gun, income and no accountability, cloaked by the false nexus of fighting for faith against militarist capitalism.

Money put ISIL on the world stage; AK-47s against air-launched missiles. Dry up the money. Watch what happens when the bullets run out. ISIL will join the list of beggars looking for sponsors, whining about what used to be. Bomb the refineries, the trade routes, the tankers. (Around the world, death–and fear–is too often tied to money.)

This brilliantly structured and colourful painting by Paolo Uccello depicts part of the battle of San Romano that was fought between Florence and Siena in 1432

An Interview with “The Syrian Girl,” A Middle East Actiivist

It seems to me her facts are accurate; her analysis is conspiratory, but presents and articulates the most common, mainstream interpretation and expressions of US connections, involvement and intent in the region and how it ties to the ongoing warfare. Watch and listen carefully.

Turkey and ISIL

A strong case can be made for engagement with Turkey, which sources two of ISIL’s most important drivers, its economic engine and its recruiting. Turkey is the center of ISIL’s smuggling operation that produces revenues of $1-3 million a day from sales of black market oil! This money fuels ISIL’s military operations, pays its combatants, supplies its stores. Without it, ISIL would be ineffective in the field.

Turkey is also the center of ISIL’s recruiting: the New York Times identifies a neighborhood in Ankara, Hacibayram, as supplying a 1000 men a week. Disrupt this chain and ISIL is unable to expand.

Take away these two pillars, revenue and recruiting; and what’s left? Strategically, Turkey is clearly more important than Syria–or Assad–and without the hypocrisy evident in US policyid if an alliance with Syria is established.

Moreover, Turkey (since 1952) is a member of NATO! Why is the US building a Western and regional alliance but failing to pressure Turkey, which cites hostages for own its reticence–when it could use its blind eye to black market smuggling as leverage on ISIL for the hostages release? Let ISIL make the call: return the 49 or lose a million or more dollars every day!

For efficiency, effectiveness, and expediency, Turkey has far more strategic impact engagement with ISIL than Syria or the Saudis. The original Times article dissembles a case for a “deal with Assad” which would only send matters of US credibility to a new low. The question about Turkey is why there has been no follow through.

The Short ISIL Story

When fighting on multiple fronts, it helps to have a single objective that benefits but contrasts with the purpose of other groups. This, in large part, is the ISIL advantage. Its goals, unmatched by other groups, entangle historic conflicts, civil conflicts, and regional struggles for hegemony.

Unlike other Syrian opposition forces, ISIL went after resource rich areas that enabled it to pay its own way. It controls these areas through force and cooperation. It built an oil smuggling network using Turkey’s southeastern border with Syria and Iran to access a black market returning $1-2 millions a day! It taxes population centers in which it allows businesses to operate.

It conceals its fighters and operations by embedding with the Syria/Iraq Sunni population, the traditional enemies of the region’s Shia governments. It controls Syrian territory al-Assad is unable to defend and Iranian territory Maliki ignored.

It’s psychological appeal reinforces its power: imagine 30,000 young men, armed and untouchable, paid regularly, possessing absolute power shared only with each other; the power trip, reinforced by killing, breaks down ethics. The power to kill is king! (It resonates: see al-Assad’s 190,000 civilian dead; ISIL’s massacre of 1700 Iran regulars, the vicious taunt of the beheadings. )

Western journalists ask old questions of strategy; this is a new phenomena. Facts and context are better for its understanding than reports of speculation and political calculation.

To The GOP Critics

It is not a war the President declared or choose. The former Republican Representative dissembles; the President’s carefully “no boots” coalition, stakeholder strategy can be followed by either party–except for the Republican demand to use war as a private sector cash cow for the military-industrial complex, building unneed buildings, air strips, hiring private contractor operating an off-budget war on no-bid contracts, moving 1000s of boots–and yet never advancing freedom, only profits. Any reading of the GOP years shows even less strategy and tactical confusion (but more guns and costs!) than the President’s 4 point plan. Their greatest achievement was to almost bankrupt the country.

How Denial and Blame Support Racism

An NYT reply. /wr

I am infuriated that you think crime explains racism. My Dartmouth-graduated daughter, her friends from Ivy schools, her peers in the corporate workplace would vehemently disagree–and point out you are ignoring their experiences with discrimination and institutional deck stacking in pursuing the American Promise.

A black student at Harvard isn’t like to confront (or commit!) crime, but will see and experience racism as attitudes and decisions that limit his or her options–from jobs and work assignments to promotions and opportunities.

Quit equating racism with poverty! Look at how it pervades the system of success by freezing highly skilled black faces in a second tier. Expand that tier to high schools, to student discipline reports that have become a school-to-prison pipeline, to part-time work within black neighborhoods–in other words focus away from crime to measure of fault and blame and stop denying the evidence encountered everyday by blacks–including the disrespect of the President.

During the last election, homeowners hung empty chairs from trees in their yards with nooses–that’s not racist? Avoid the sweeping generalities (who thinks of stats when they react to shoot black teenagers in a car?) and look at the provision of services from grocery stores to library hours to fees for rec teams to wages and new restrictions on voting–which “just grew.” Those differences are rooted in and supported by more than crime.
 
And it should be obvious why blacks don’t match the experience of other groups; think: slavery. Its legal restrictions resulted in other restrictions until the 1960s.

St. Helena Island, SC. 1936. LOC.